A quarry worker was stripping clay from the ground when he felt odd bumps -- they turned out to be part of a 150-million-year-old footprint.

A worker at Dewars Farm Quarry in Britain was in his vehicle when he unknowingly uncovered an old highway -- but this was not the kind of highway you're thinking of. This one comes from the Middle Jurassic Period, estimated at 166 million years ago by scientists, in what researchers at the universities of Oxford and Birmingham have dubbed a "dinosaur highway." This trail contains of hundreds of different dinosaur footprints on the quarry's limestone floor.

The initial "unusual bumps" worker Gary Johnson felt when stripping back clay in the quarry turned out to lead to five extensive trackways -- experts believe plenty more trackways exist in the area -- of dinosaur footprints, the longest stretching nearly 500 feet in length. Four of the tracks likely came thanks to the Cetiosaurus, a nearly 60-foot-long sauropod, a long-necked herbivore.

The fifth track wasn't from an herbivore, but a more violent Megalosaurus, a clawed, three-toed carnivorous theropod. The university experts believe one area shows the carnivore and herbivore tracks intersecting, leading to questions of how the two potentially interacted.

"These footprints offer an extraordinary window in to the lives of dinosaurs," Kirsty Edgar, professor of micropaleontology at the University of Birmingham, said in a statement, "revealing details about their movements, interactions, and the tropical environment they inhabited."

Each Megalosaurus track is around two feet long, with a stride length of nearly nine feet, allowing scientists to estimate the speed of walking at around three miles per hour, akin to an average adult human's walking speed.

The 100 workers from the quarry and universities clearing the quarry floor of mud and clay completely revealed about 200 footprints over one week. The team then built detailed 3D models of the site using aerial drone photography and documented the footprints in detail. The site was once a warm tropical sea with patches of mudflats and pockets of shallow marine lagoons, the scientists said.

The fresh find matches 40 sets of footprints found in a nearby limestone quarry in 1997, although technology didn't allow for the detailed documentation of the site back then as it was done for the new find. "There is much more that we can learn from this site, which is an important part of our natural Earth heritage," Richard Butler, professor of paleobiology at the University of Birmingham, said in a statement. "Our 3D models will allow researchers to continue to study and make accessible this fascinating piece of our past for generations to come."

The team now has over 20,000 images of the prints and hope further study can help reveal insights into how dinosaurs walked, how fast they went, how they may have interacted, and just how large they really were. "The preservation is so detailed that we can see how the mud was deformed as the dinosaur's feet squelched in and out," Duncan Murdock, Earth scientist at Oxford University Museum of Natural History, said in a statement. "Along with other fossils like burrows, shells, and plants, we can bring to life the muddy lagoon environment the dinosaurs walked through."

Emma Nicholls, vertebrate paleontologist at Oxford, said this new find could really provide a new jolt of information about the Megalosaurus, the first dinosaur ever named when it was discovered 200 years ago. "Scientists have known about and been studying Megalosaurus for longer than any other dinosaur on Earth," Nicholls said in a statement about the dino, which likely walked on two legs and weighed more than 2.2 tons while stretching nearly 30 feet long, "and yet these recent discoveries prove there is still new evidence of these animals out there, waiting to be found."